HPA announces Engineering Excellence Awards recipients

LOS ANGELES — The Hollywood Post Alliance has announced the recipients of the organization’s 2014 Engineering Excellence Award and the HPA Judges Award for Creativity and Innovation in Post Production. These awards were developed to recognize the technical excellence and creative innovation that continually drive the post production industry in the advancement and support of content creation. The honors will be bestowed on November 6th during the ninth annual HPA Awards (www.hpaawards.net) gala at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles.

The Engineering Excellence Award spotlights companies and individuals who draw upon technical and creative ingenuity and apply it to real world post demands while raising the profile of breakthrough technologies.

The winners of the 2014 HPA Engineering Excellence Awards are:

MACOM: 12G-SDI Chipset: 12G-SDI is the next data rate in the evolution of SDI, and MACOM has introduced the industry's first complete chipset to enable next-generation 4K video production applications. Our newest family of SDI equalizers, reclockers and cable drivers supports 4K video resolutions at 60 frames per second over a single link and complements our industry-leading crosspoint switch portfolio.

“The MACOM team is honored to accept an Engineering Excellence Award from the Hollywood Post Alliance,” said Hasnain Bajwa, Senior Vice President and General Manager, High-Performance Analog at MACOM. “We are encouraged to be recognized for our technical achievement by such an esteemed panel of industry insiders and thankful for the contributions of our customers, partners and supporters as we help to enable the migration to 12G-SDI for the next generation of broadcast video equipment.”

NVIDIA: NVIDIA VCA: Accelerate design and VFX workflows with NVIDIA Visual Computing Appliance (VCA), the fastest way to interactive photorealistic digital 3D models and scenes. This network-attached appliance easily integrates into the design workflow and scales to multiple VCAs, each decreasing the time to noiseless, physically based global illumination.

“The Hollywood Post Alliance’s recognition of NVIDIA VCA is validation of how our GPU rendering appliance is changing the way filmmakers, artists and animators work. NVIDIA VCA removes the need to wait hours for rendered movies and allows artists to interact and edit their photo-real digital models in real time, dramatically accelerating the review and approval process,” said Jeff Brown, vice president and general manager of Professional Visualization and Design at NVIDIA.

Wohler/Cinnafilm Joint Venture: Tachyon Wormhole

Tachyon Wormhole is a file-based Retiming and Standards Transcoding solution, which leverages commodity enterprise hardware to deliver content based on time or standards requirements. Fully automated with audio pitch correction and caption retiming, Tachyon Wormhole processes two files faster than real time, simultaneously, on a single small footprint server.

Ernie Sanchez, COO, Cinnafilm, Inc. commented, "Because it is peer-based, few awards invoke the same sense of pride as the HPA Engineering Excellence award. We are truly honored to be recognized a second time by the HPA for our achievements, and we are thrilled that we earned it through intelligent partnering with the team at Wohler."

The HPA Judges Award for Creativity and Innovation in Post Production was conceived to recognize companies and individuals who have demonstrated excellence, whether in the development of workflow and process to support creative storytelling and/or technical innovation. A jury of peers and industry experts determines the HPA Judges Award winners.

The 2014 winners of the HPA Judges Award for Creativity and Innovation in Post Production are:

American Society of Cinematographers: Color Decision List (ASC CDL): The ASC CDL helps maintain and communicate creative intent, from production, dailies, post, VFX, editorial, in a multi-facility, multi-vendor environment. The ASC CDL enables creatives to set the look of a shot via system-independent primary color corrections communicated as metadata from on-set through dailies and post. Developed by the ASC Technology Committee - a broad group of industry members working to benefit the industry - the ASC CDL is freely available, saving time and money, improving the artistic result and audience experience in the vast majority of motion pictures, TV shows, and VFX.

David Reisner, D-Cinema Consulting commented, “We are honored to be recognized by our colleagues at the HPA. The ASC CDL was developed to help all participants in the production and post pipeline most effectively produce the best result and deliver the creative vision of filmmakers to audiences. The ASC CDL could only have been created by filmmakers, the post community, and vendors’ active collaboration.”

DigitalFilm Tree: Cloud Post Workflow Initiative (ProStack)

ProStack enables instantly accessible, widely deployable post production. ProStack packs the capacity and bandwidth needed to manage the entire post process- high-end color correction, VFX and DI workflows- into a scalable solution. Flexible design and implementation incorporates the best tools for every job, connecting all users via cloud storage. ProStack, in conjunction with Critique, integrates the entire spectrum of file-based workflows into one hub, while simultaneously embracing the evolving role of production and the post facility.

Guillaume Aubuchon, DigitalFilm Tree CTO commented, “We have been focused on developing a system that is truly cloud based and easily useable for our clients, an OpenStack environment with secure and instantaneous access. It is an honor to be recognized by the HPA for our work on ProStack, and we are honored to receive our second C&I Award.”

Leon Silverman, President of the HPA commented, "The HPA Awards have become an important acknowledgement and celebration of creativity in content, technology and workflow innovation. This year’s awards for Engineering Excellence and Creativity and Innovation in Post Production represent significant and foundational new approaches. The HPA is proud to be able to recognize these outstanding achievements.”

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